Writely warms to OpenDocument

The company behind Web-based word processor Writely announced on Monday that it will handle documents saved in the OpenDocument format.

Writely was launched by privately held Upstartle in August of this year as a Web site to store, edit and share word processing documents.

The site allows people to upload Microsoft Word documents, which are converted to HTML. The company intends to support Adobe Systems' PDF and RTF as well.

On Monday, Upstartle said that users can also upload OpenOffice documents onto Writely. OpenOffice is an open-source desktop productivity suite that uses the OpenDocument document formats.

Users can also convert documents stored on Writely and save them as OpenDocument and Word files, according to Upstartle, a four-person outfit based in Portola Valley, Calif.

The company chose to support OpenDocument because of customer requests, said Sam Schillace, Upstartle co-founder. Writely has several tens of thousands of users, he said.

The Writely Web site saves documents in XHTML format. Because OpenDocument is based on XML, "it's a very easy translation," Schillace said.

OpenDocument has been gathering more support from software vendors other than Microsoft in the past few months.

IBM, Sun Microsystems, Google and Adobe, for example, are developing OpenDocument-based products or committing resources to organizations dedicated to OpenDocument.

Microsoft intends to accommodate OpenDocument in its dominant Office suite via third-party products rather than native file format support.

[Captain_Spock]

What Should Be The IT Industry's Focus!...

Open Document (On OpenDocument that is based on XML) or (from a "Banking Technology" Standpoint -- OpenDoc as a way of building compound documents with collections of small, portable components called Parts. These parts reside in Containers, and you can put any type of part into any kind of container. Learn only one text-editing part and you can put it into any document container you please. The same goes for spreadsheet parts, or graphics parts, spellchecking parts and so on")???

Stealers

So THIS is where MS is getting the idea for the "ribbon" interface in Office 12.

Aww, and I almost thought it was original.

[Arty Choke]

Good for them

I have been using OpenOffice.org for 2 years, It works well with MySQL, and the newest version is much faster. Ditch Office!